A system closed in some key parts is closed, no matter how many layers of FOSS depend on it. Wanna build up on a closed system? It's a bet, pray that open alternatives come indirectly to your rescue by simply being there.

He used proprietary software to get the GNU project up and running. First thing he wrote was an editor, then a compiler using that editor, then tools using that compiler and editor, then more tools using the existing tools, compiler, editor, etc.

With a proprietary compiler, likely. The difference between building a toolchain and in perspective an OS for an eventually self hosted environment vs. building stuff using the.net framework, especially when targeting windows, should have been obvious to a low ID slashdotter.Open hardware would be better, ditto for open firmware, and free compilers are here already. But as long as their specification are correct / no backdoors, showstopping bugs, and as long as I am the owner of the product they issue (whi

"The difference between building a toolchain and in perspective an OS for an eventually self hosted environment vs. building stuff using the.net framework, especially when targeting windows, should have been obvious to a low ID slashdotter."

That is obvious to me. The point I was making is that open source software didn't come out of nowhere. It had to be jump started by something.

Awesome, open source code that requires you to use a closed source system to run it. That always makes me laugh.

Are you running on pure open hardware? is all the microcode on all your firmware devices open source?

You have a piece of software that can be integrated in a.NET web app to gain more visibility into how the app functions. Having that available is a good thing if you write.NET code. Having the source code available is a potentially better thing for you (I say potentially because I'm speaking of immediate and direct utility). The fact that.NET itself is not open source, and that windows itself is not open source does not nullify the utility of access to the source code for this profiler.

You (and the blog you linked to) seem to have a different definition of open source then most of us...

From your link:

Reference License

The.NET Framework source is being released under a read-only reference license.

*emphasis mine

And as for Mono, my understanding is that they specifically avoided touching the reference code so the that Mono is considered a reversed engineered product and that no developers were tainted by being given access to the MS code.

The.NET Framework source is being released under a read-only reference license....If the software you are developing is for Windows platforms, you can look at the code, even if that software has "the same or substantially the same features or functionality" as the.NET Framework.

It's open source but not FOSS, and not granting any freedom from software patents, a safety which cannot be granted anyway, until obvious stuff can be patented.

I'm not sure what a "Real only license" is, so I assume you meant to write "read-only".

Even then it doesn't make any sense to me, because Mono is GPL and LGPL, and ASP.NET MVC is under Ms-PL; the latter is considered a "free software license" by FSF (it's effectively BSDL + patent clause). Neither are "read-only" in any meaningful sense.

in the real world people include lots of closed source stuff when using it.

In real world, most people who use Linux also use proprietary closed-source NVidia graphics drivers. That's because, in real world, most people are pragmatists and not fanat

Sadly Joel Sprotsky the ex-Microsoftie still has a lot of work to do: choosing.NET and Windows server (!) was probably far from the smartest idea. All the biggest websites (eBay, Amazon, GMail, Google, Wikipedia, etc.) do NOT run on Windows servers for a reason.

'best and most comprehensive production web page profiler out there for any web platform.'

That's a little bit misleading. This project is basically instrumentation that you add to an asp.net 4.0 webapp. It does not seem to be usable by any other kind of webapp. It doesn't even look like it would be easy to port to the other major platforms.

I suppose one of the problems with nitpicking is that it is exceedingly easy to blur the lines between one facet of the development process and another. From an extremely high level view, I would probably argue that ideas live on one end of the spectrum and coding, implementation, and--as you suggested--architecture live on the other.

But, since you replied, I would assume that you understood the gist of my point which was that ideas are not the hard part by any stretch of the imagination.

Yeah for sure. I should have said that you made good points up front. I was just trying to contribute, but there is so much stupid sniping on/. that it doesn't go without saying!

Yeah, definitely. I appreciate your additions (and deserved corrections) to my complaints about the article's author and his comments. I owe you an apology for my somewhat defensive reply for reasons you undoubtedly understand. In fact, you pointed it out! There's really no excuse for my defensive behavior.

It is nice that these utilities are part of a growing amount of open source.NET code (like Apache's efforts helped grow F/LOSS software for Java).
That said, those who want to support a Q&A community running on Free code can look at:

Legality of course has nothing to do with taste. Is the fact that Linux and its associates are copies of UNIX in poor taste? Yes, initially; I'd say so. Programmers are rarely known for their taste (nor, I think, should they be expected to be; that's not what we—read: society at large—expects from them. Still, nothing fluffs your bona fides like success, so is Linux in poor taste now? Doubtful.

As for spreadsheets, I'm glad Lotus and Borland got that settled before

If tepples has such a history, I wasn't aware of it; I was only responding to his post. Nor was I unappreciative—quite the opposite: I took his point, though obviously I don't entirely agree with it. I am the better for examining points in opposition to my own.

That said, I don't disagree with what you wrote otherwise, and I'll certainly grant that familiarity is often—usually—an overriding concern. I don't think that nullifies whether or not something is in poor taste or not, however.

I have him friended because I find his posts pretty entertaining (I use the friend system on/. as a glorified "hey, I like this person's posts" filter), and perhaps I would have been better off classifying his comment history as "snarky" more than sarcastic. Either way, I get a great deal of enjoyment out of it even if I completely disagree with the point he's making, but I think that's largely because a lot of people are unnecessarily touchy.:)

Many of the commenters seem pretty cranky, but I am very excited by this tool, it's exactly what I need and very nicely put together. I'll certainly be weaving it into my project. It shows the same dense but tight information presentation, use of AJAX techniques, and clean, modern web coding techniques that makes Stack Overflow so popular in the first place.